Odyssey Theater

The Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company, which stages all-female versions of Shakespeare's classics, is by its very nature iconoclastic. There is an implicit radicalism in the notion of women playing the great male Shakespearean roles. However, there's nothing polemical about the company's production of "Othello" at the Odyssey. This is simply good, solid Shakespeare, thoughtfully staged and performed.

Actor John Rubinstein was at his Tarzana home reading the newspaper one morning when he came upon a review of Donald Margulies' "Sight Unseen" at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. "It was very moving, very interesting and very original," recalls Rubinstein, who had seen and admired the play in New York. "I started mumbling to myself that I wish I'd known it was coming here. . . . It's the kind of play that you want to do."

Actor John Rubinstein was at his Tarzana home reading the newspaper one morning when he came upon a review of Donald Margulies' "Sight Unseen" at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. "It was very moving, very interesting and very original," recalls Rubinstein, who had seen and admired the play in New York. "I started mumbling to myself that I wish I'd known it was coming here. . . . It's the kind of play that you want to do."

The Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company, which stages all-female versions of Shakespeare's classics, is by its very nature iconoclastic. There is an implicit radicalism in the notion of women playing the great male Shakespearean roles. However, there's nothing polemical about the company's production of "Othello" at the Odyssey. This is simply good, solid Shakespeare, thoughtfully staged and performed.

Forty-five years ago, Tom Lillard played Prisoner Number Two in "The Brig," the legendary off-off Broadway play about harsh conditions in a 1957 Marine Corps prison, put up by the Living Theater, which was later shut down for not paying taxes. The company and play were revived in New York last year, and Lillard now directs the play at the Odyssey Theater Ensemble. "This play . . . creates a band of brothers like no other play I've ever been in," Lillard says.

Subtitled "An Evening Away From the City," this premiere of two one-acts by Richard J. Clayman at Odyssey Theater II is disappointingly uneventful. The plays lack momentum and sufficient conflict. "Los Grandes Pescadores (The Great Fishermen)," directed by Gino Tanasescu, charts a weekend fishing trip among four adult friends, who sluggishly come to grips with themselves in a motel room.

In "Abel and Cain, a Biblical Debacle" at the Odyssey Theater, internationally renowned solo performance artists Fred Curchack and Daniel Stein collaborate as creator-performers for the first time. (Curchack has directed Stein in the past and currently has two solo pieces running at the Odyssey.) The two, whose theatrical credits range from Japanese Noh to the French National Theatre, have engineered a satirical sendup of the creative process that is as eclectic as their backgrounds.

In the Odyssey Theatre's seamless production of Vaclav Havel's satire "The Memorandum," director Jessica Kubzansky creates an alarmingly recognizable, absurdist twilight zone. Although Havel wrote of a business company in 1965 Czechoslovakia, the madness of bureaucracy and its dehumanizing effects still resonate. Scenic designer Michael Marlowe uses a jumble of black letters on a medium blue background to decorate the walls, floors and the backs of moving set pieces.

Crime may not pay, but being a judge sure can. Joining Cher, Anthony Robbins and Jane Fonda on the growing list of "infomercial" celebrities is Judge Joseph A. Wapner of television's "The People's Court." The retired Los Angeles Superior Court judge stars in a new infomercial selling legal advice tapes.

I would like to correct some misinformation about the Tiffany Theater: In his review of "Fatty" ("Thin Dialogue, Gaunt Plot," Aug. 23), Dan Sullivan wrote that "given (the theater's) Sunset Strip address, the rental will be very high." Our rental costs to producers are completely competitive with other 99-seat Waiver houses in Los Angeles and are, in fact, lower than many when you take into account the services included: box office, extensive sound and lighting equipment, utilities, maintenance, etc. The waiver rule means that Equity waives rules in theaters of 99 seats or less, recognizing that such showcases have value to their membership but that such theaters are not economically viable.

The outdoor Theatricum Botanicum, nestled in the woods of Topanga Canyon, is such an appropriate setting for "Winter's Tale," with its flowers, its folk songs and mead, that Shakespeare's bucolic atmosphere can seldom have looked sweeter. Director Ellen Geer (who handsomely essays the role of the wrongly scorned queen, Hermione) takes a play that ranges all over place and time, and briskly marshals events into a comprehensible two-hour afternoon, including intermission.